General tips for milling fresh flour (Komo Fidibus Classic)?

Hi, everyone.

Xingfeng supply professional and honest service.

We recently ordered the Komo Fidibus Classic mill, so we’re really looking forward to experiencing freshly milled flour. I’m fairly familiar with the difference of using whole grains (vs. white flour), since for some time I’ve used whole grain flours from a local bakery. I’ll expect a slightly shorter, more dense loaf than what white flour produces.

However, with my own mill, I want to be sure it’s done right – and I’m hoping that those of you who are already comfortable with milling could respond to some queries. At the moment, they include the following:

1. How finely can the Komo Classic grind the grains? How often do you need to run the same batch through the mill a second time, in order to achieve a more open crumb in the baked loaf?

2. Before milling the berries, do you rinse and dry them or just use them directly from the package?

3. With the Komo Fidibus Classic, how long do you usually wait for the flour to cool before mixing it? What is typically the temperature of something like spelt or rye immediately after milling?

Thanks for your input!

All the best
Phillip

Hi Phillip,
I see this post is a week old so you have probably already tried yor new mill and congratulations on getting one of the best. I don’t have the classic instead the slightly smaller 21but I will gladly share what I have found from a couple years of using it.

1.The flour is fine but not as fine as roller milled still good to make bread. Normally I don’t run the whole batch through more than once but sift out the larger pieces with a 40 mesh sieve and regrind them sometimes resift in if I want a high extraction flour instead of whole grain. The results usually fall in the 90-95% extraction range depending on the grain.

2. All the grain I have gotten has been cleaned well and I don’t bother. If you have the option of getting some directly from the field a thorough cleaning would be in order.

3. I don’t wait for any specific time and have ground directly into the mixing bowl. The temperature will depend on the amount of grain yor are grinding. As the stones heat due to the friction of grinding they will transfer increasing heat to the flour. Typically with the 350-500g I grind the temperature is slightly over 100F not high enough to worry about. With the high speed micronizer mill I was using before the Komo the temp could get as high as 140F.

Happy milling,
Stu

Hi, Stu.

Thanks for your response. Unfortunately, I’m still waiting on the mill to be delivered, so your response remains entirely relevant: I still have zero experience with the mill.

It’s good to know that you normally don’t have to re-grind a batch, though your comment reminds me that I need to get my hands on a mesh sieve, in case larger than desired pieces come through. I once made a couple loaves of spelt with really coarsely milled flour from a local bakery, so I want to avoid the super coarse stuff. It was like biting into the largest ever oatmeal cookie, but without any sugar or cream filling…so in other words, not exciting for a “cookie.”

Wow, that’s great that the freshly milled grains are only around 100F/37.7C. From what I understand, the oils in the grains do better when milling doesn’t set them over 120F or so.

I’ve stocked up on a range of grains and wheat, so now I’m just waiting for the mill to arrive. It’s definitely exciting!

Thanks again for your response.

All the best
Phillip

Your welcome Phillip. I forgot to mention that when making flour it is ground on the finest setting. On the coarser settings I have made cornmeal from organic dent corn, cracked grains for a bread additive, and oats that resemble steel cut for some very good hot oatmeal. The cornmeal was the only occasion that the Komo sort if failed me and that was because the corn was too big to feed into the mill. It had to be preground in an ancient stainless steel container Vita Mix we have hanging about, a very loud and violent process as well as a messy one.

One of the pleasures of having your own mill is deciding what grains or variety of wheat you want to use as well as the proportions and custom grinding for each loaf.

Stu

I am also awaiting my new Mockmill 100. At present, I am making the Tartine No.3 10% rye/whole wheat bread.
The book calls for
rye flour 50g
"High extraction" wheat flour 200g
medium strong bread flour 200g
whole grain wheat flour 50g

Since I don’t have “high extraction”, I have been using
rye 50g
whole wheat flour 75
White whole wheat flour 75
White bread flour 300g
When I start milling my own wheat flour, I’m not quite sure how to substitute. Any ideas about where to start? For the high extraction, can I use the flour straight from the mill? How about the “whole wheat”? Should I be ordering a 40 mesh sifter?
Thanks for any suggestions!

Hi, mflac.

Glad to hear that you’ve also decided to get into milling. Unless I’m mistaken, the way to get certain extraction percentages in your flour is with a sifter, as you suggested – and the 40 mesh sifter should be fine for bread making. To mill grains and then use them just as they come out of the mill would be 100% extraction or “whole grain” flour. If you want to stick with the recipe from the Tartine series, then I think “high extraction” would involve sifting out a bit of the bran.

Note to anybody: Please correct me if I’m wrong!

I have a Nutri-Mill and have found that starting the motor with the stones “open” or not touching and then adjusting the grind setting until I just hear a rub.
Then I add the grain.
After a second I adjust the grind as fine as possible.
This procedure gives me a nice result.
When the grain hopper is just empty, I quickly coarsen the grind to prevent excessive wear to the stones.
Baking with this flour gives me a very dense, 100 percent whole grain loaf. Bolting or sifting 50 percent of the flour through a 40 mesh screen results in a more airy loaf. Less bran to cut all those lovely gluten strands.
If I bolt or sift 100 percent of my freshly milled grain, I get a very open “Tartine like” loaf.
I’ve also found I need to increase my saturation levels to 80 or more when using unbolted flour. That bran sucks up tons of water.
And finally, I found double grinding to be very messy and not worth the extra time and clean up.

I’ve had my Classic about 2-1/2 years. I initially tried an old-fashion hand sifter to remove some of the bran but found this too slow and tiring of my hand. I invested in Komo’s sifting attachment but was very disappointed. The things that I don’t like with it are the need to disassemble/reassemble the mill, the risk of loosing some small springs that separate the stones, and extra cleaning after each use.
I’ve had good success with using a simple sieve of a fine stainless steel screen on a light frame. I started with a Scandicrafts “10.25 inch fine mesh flour sifter” on Amazon. This is about 36 mesh and for me yields about 88% extract. It only costs about $6. It gets some unfavorable reviews, but I find it great if I only use it for flour and keep out of water. With a bowl that is wide enough to accommodate the screen and shallow enough to fit under the output from the mill I am able to rotate and shake the bowl to keep up with the milling.
I’ve also tried a 60 mesh Neeshow screen from Amazon but find that this too fine. I get about 75% extraction but it requires much more shaking. If I use this sifter I first run the flour through the 36 mesh screen to remove the coarser bran. I think this is representative of the large-scale bolting appliances that use a series of screens of successively finer mesh.
I usually mill with a setting of 4-6 clicks backed off from where the stones make contact. I’ve backed off more, but I don’t find that it makes a lot of difference to the extraction rate.
My bran goes into my oatmeal. I don’t run it back through the mill at a finer grind.

Hi Phillip,

Hopefully someone will answer your mill-setting questions.

In the meantime, I can offer specifics about the einkorn amaranth porridge recipe – I didn’t grind or crack the amaranth. It cooks basically as long as rice or steel cut oats, so the amaranth gets fairly soft. Both steel cut oat porridge and amaranth porridge still have texture when cooked thoroughly, but neither can be felt in the crumb of porridge breads (by me at least). I could see the little amaranth grains though (last photo in the recipe’s gallery).

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Decorating the outside of the dough with uncooked amaranth or oats is another story - the grains are not soft enough, and would benefit from passing through a mill imo.

Hope this helps.

p.s. I hear you on storage issues. I have a basement, but in the summer it’s in the mid-70s even down there. So, my husband and I compete for basement fridge space (his hops for brewing vs. my whole grain flours). He doesn’t put his grains in the fridge, though, so I’ll ask him for his temp, storage time limits and rationale, and get back to you. I have been copying him and keeping my wheat berries on a shelf in the basement outside the fridge. Figuring the whole grain flour needs the cold more than the intact berries? Flax seeds go in the fridge though because I had a batch of those from Trader Joes smell rancid once before the sell-by date. Nose is so important!

Thanks, Melissa, for your response.

I’ll look forward to hearing more details about how you store grains and hops at your place. That will be helpful. If it’s okay for the intact berries to be stored at slightly higher temperatures, then that would be a relief, since I’ve only been milling them as needed. Once I got the Komo mill, I bought a really large amount of whole berries (i.e., spelt, wheat, and rye), but it dawned on me later that I need to understand how they’ll react in the long term to the temperature of our home. I’d say it normally fluctuates around 75–79F or 23–26C.

On the porridge issue, it’s good to know how you made the amaranth porridge. Do you know whether that’s generally how any porridge would be made – just cooking intact grains for 20–30 minutes? Theoretically, would you be comfortable making, say, a rye porridge just by boiling whole rye berries in water for a bit? Or would you first crack them – or really grind them – with a mill? As mentioned in my initial message, I’ve never made any sort of porridge, so I’m trying to get a good impression of what it involves.

Thanks again!

Sorry it took so long for me to come back to this. Busy week!

So, from the homebrew beer world, my husband’s guidelines are wheat grains/berries need to be under 80F, in a dark place or opaque container, airtight and dry.

He uses anything he grinds within 24 hours. (Beer grain grinding is different from bread, more a crushing, so I don’t use his equipment.)

He agrees that refrigerating whole grain flour is the best way to go. We didn’t discuss freezing. Nor did we talk about hops, but I see you mentioned being curious about them too. He vacuum seals them and freezes them.

It sounds like your apartment temp is okay. I guess I would minimize shelf stock as summer begins, and carry more inventory in the cold months.

At only 20% the total flour, the dough felt pretty good, not sticky. I’m going to try 40% soon. I’m also still working on a milling strategy for the chickpeas. Last time I thought to do a coarse mill followed by a fine milling. But the coarse milled flour needed a long time to cool down before being able to pass thru the mill again. I’m either going to do a much coarser first mill (my husband’s suggestion) or go back to milling everything super fine just once. That worked great when I did it months ago, I just can help think it’s traumatic to the mill lol. It sounds like I’m crushing rocks!

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